Software Is Changing (Again)

Andrej Karpathy's 2025 Y Combinator AI Startup School talk on software's third era: programs written in English prompts, LLMs understood as utilities, fabs, and 1960s-style operating systems, and a coming decade of partial-autonomy products and agent-ready infrastructure.

6 sections ยท 16 lessons

Course outline

Three Software Paradigms

  1. Software 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0
  2. Prompts Are Programs in English
  3. How Software 2.0 Ate Autopilot

The LLM Ecosystem

  1. LLMs as Utilities and Fabs
  2. LLMs as Operating Systems
  3. The 1960s of Computing, Again
  4. Flipped Technology Diffusion
  5. Which Analogy Explains It?

LLM Psychology

  1. People Spirits with Superhuman Memory
  2. Jagged Intelligence, Amnesia, and Gullibility

Partial Autonomy

  1. Anatomy of an LLM App
  2. Spin the Generation-Verification Loop
  3. The Decade of Agents
  4. Adding Autonomy to Photoshop

Everyone Is a Programmer

  1. Vibe Coding: A Gateway Drug
  2. MenuGen: Code Was the Easy Part

Building for Agents

  1. A Third Consumer of Software
  2. Meet the LLMs Halfway
  3. Agent-Readiness Audit

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